The Most Controversial Mom in America

We’ll give Amy Chua credit where it’s due: This woman knows how to sell books. She is now professing a certain degree of astonishment at the virtriolic comments being made about her new memoir, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, but for pete’s sake, she’s a Harvard-educated Yale professor—she knew darn well that her tales of rejecting her young daughters’ handmade birthday cards and and disallowing bathroom breaks during piano practice, all in the service of raising high-achieving children, would lead to a national uproar. And indeed that is exactly what has happened ever since the Wall Street Journal first published an excerpt from the book on January 8th.

And now Pasadena, no slouch in the high-achieving-kid department, is getting its very own Chua appearance, mere days after the book’s publication. She’ll be at Vroman’s on Tuesday, and we’re predicting a packed house and a potentially heated audience. (This book has bumped Helen of Pasadena from the spot of The Book Everyone Is Talking About.) She is a fascinating woman—she writes about her intense, possibly abusive parenting with such wit that you often can’t tell if she’s making fun of herself of not. She seems incredibly bright and funny yet mysteriously obtuse in not understanding why the whole country wouldn’t find her story of teaching-by-berating inspirational.